Active roll mode control implementation on a narrow tilting vehicle

This paper describes work carried out on the development of a narrow tilting vehicle at the University of Minnesota. The project had two objectives. One objective was to better understand the dynamics of two-passenger leaning vehicles. The other was to use this understanding to design and implement leaning control on such a vehicle. The desire was to make a tilting vehicle as easy, in some sense, to drive as a non-leaning vehicle. The scope of this work was fourfold. First, a model of such a system was developed and linearized to obtain a fourth-order linear model. Second, a tilt controller was designed to stabilize a tilting vehicle's unstable rolling mode. Third, the system and controller were simulated using both Simulink and a real time simulator written with Visual Basic. Fourth, and most importantly, an experimental vehicle was built and used for implementation. Comparisons were made between the simulated system and the experimental vehicle. This illustrated the limitations encountered in the simulations but also showed similarities that validated the model. Also, experimental results showed that the vehicle was stabilized well by the controller within the limitations of our hardware.